Liquitex Acrylic Ink Review

This month’s My Fave Monday feature is on Liquitex Professional Acrylic Inks. This company is fast becoming one of my favourites in general. Their products are great quality and work so well together. Their overall branding and online presence are also great, which the graphic designer in me is a total sucker for. If you’re thinking of trying out acrylic ink, this is definitely a brand to have on your list.

I’ve been contemplating trying out acrylic ink in my mixed media work for a while and came across the Liquitex brand in my research. Because I was already happy with other product lines in this brand, I thought I would give them a try.

Pros/Specs
One of the benefits of using an acrylic ink as opposed to watercolour which can give you a similar effect, is that it is permanent and highly water-resistant when it dries.
This product is extremely versatile in that you can use it for various applications like colour blocking, airbrushing, calligraphy, stamping. Liquitex also offers a colour match system across all of their lines of products which is ideal if you like to mix your mediums to get different effects. This essentially ensures that whatever colour palette you choose within the Liquitex family of products, you won’t have to worry about not finding the exact same colour in another medium. These high-quality pigments also offer great lightfastness, are quick drying and are non-clogging. You can choose from 30 available colours, three of which are metallic.

One thing I particularly love is that a little goes a long way with this product. It may seem like you aren’t getting very much in the 1 oz bottles, but as little as 1 or 2 drops can cover a surprising amount of surface area. If you choose to water it down slightly, you can get even more out of it. Diluting the colours with water also allows you to get a range of lighter colours. The pigments seem to work well being mixed with each other to create other colours if necessary. I would highly recommend doing some test swatches on different types of paper to see what the results are first. You will also see which colours require more layers to reach their full saturation.

Artists TipThis product cleans up well off of a standard plastic palette and washes off your hands which soap and water as well. If you follow me on Facebook or Instagram you may have seen my post about “The Great Yellow Spill 2K16” in which I spilt my Orange Yellow Azo bottle all over my desk, which then dripped onto my beige carpet. After some anxiety and fierce Googling, I discovered that vodka is your friend folks. It’s not just for a good time, it also gets this particular ink out of the carpet. It takes a few passes but works rather remarkably. You could use rubbing alcohol as well just as an FYI. Of course, you could just save both your ink and your vodka by not spilling to begin with by promptly closing the bottle once you’ve taken out whatever you need. In case this ever happens to you I’ll just say “you’re welcome” right now though 🙂

Cons
So far, I don’t really have any negative things to say about this product. If I come across any as I use it more though I will update this post to reflect that.

I haven’t tried creating a piece solely with the inks, but I’m really enjoying using them with coloured pencil. In my mixed media piece “Trinitas” featured in the image below, I used the inks to colour block in the base of the poppies and then layered with coloured pencil over top to bring out more details.

If you like to experiment mixing wet and dry media together, love vibrant colours and want professional quality this product is high on my recommendation list.